Plating

These settings control the plating details of the spaceship. There are also other controls like enabling shading effects to alter the look of your ship in render.

Figure 1

These are the Plating properties and what they do:

Plating

This lets you set the number of plating details in the ship.

Figure 2

Size

The size of the plating detail randomized between the values of the min and max properties.

Fikgure 3

Tolerance

Determines if plating detail can expand over sharp edges based on face normal angle threshold.

Figure 4

This works like the Cut Method: Wrap in the Random Panels operator in Random Flow which allows the panel islands to grow beyond or wrap around sharp angled edges.

Adjacent Faces

Using Clear when generating plate details will avoid overlapping other plate details to create more relaxed ares. Using Fill will pose no limits and create more details if possible.

Figure 5

Even Offset

Turns on or off even offset when extruding the plate details using the Depth property. Having this on ensures the extruded faces maintain a similar area. If you encounter geometry spikes, disable this option to resolve the issue.

Figure 6

Thickness

This determines the thickness or scale of the plate details. You can toggle the chain icon to get this value to randomize between the mix/max properties.

Figure 7

Depth

This determines the depth or extrusion distance of the plate details. You can toggle the chain icon to get this value to randomize between the mix/max properties.

Figure 8

Margin Type

Determines which margin type to use for the plate details. All means margin can be used on embossed or debossed plate details. Indent Only means margin can only be used on indented or debossed plate details.

Figure 9

Margin

The amount of margin or boundary for the plate details.

Figure 10

Reverse Depth

This contains two properties: Amount and Seed. The Amount property is a percentage value that specifies the number of plate details that will have their depth direction inverted. The Seed property is used to randomize which plate details are affected.

Figure 11

Limit Smooth

This lets you set the face normal shading for the ship. None means no special shading used, Base will mark the boundary edges of the plate details as sharp and the top faces as smooth and Top will mark the boundary edges of the top faces as sharp and the boundary edges of the plate detail as smooth.

Figure 12

Shading

This property will show up after using Limit Smooth: None and will let you choose what basic face normal shading to use for the ship. This has three options: Smooth, By Angle and Flat.

Figure 13

These are the basic or default shading options in Blender that you can also find in the W specials menu.

Plating Seed

The random seed control for all the properties in the Plating section that can be randomized.

Figure 14

This feature allows you to quickly create detail by means of geometry and to also easily break the smooth profile of the ship leading to more interesting silhouettes.

This also generates UV for the ship by uv marking the boundary edges of the plate details.

Figure 16

Even the wings generated are uv marked automatically so this effect becomes seamless even when adding both the large and small wing extrusions.

Figur 17

The resulting UV is a great starting base for you to do little fixes to come up with the perfect UV map and it's definitely better than starting from zero.

Figure 18

You can decide to not use plating details and create this effect using texture displacement, bump or normap map. You have to UV this manually but its easier without the complicated geometry of the plating details.